An IT leader’s guide to Zoom AI Companion

More and more, organizations are seeing AI as an imperative technology for employees, as opposed to a nice-to-have. As an IT leader, you’re at the forefront of this wave of digital transformation, tasked with bringing the right technology to help employees collaborate and communicate effectively. 

With so many AI solutions available, your team might be overwhelmed with evaluating and testing different tools based on various factors, including cost, quality, integrations, and security and privacy. Finding a trusted and effective solution takes time. But moving too slowly can come with its own pitfalls. If eager employees aren’t provided with approved AI tools, they might start using unvetted apps for their work, and you won’t know how company data is being handled or whether it’s being used to train third-party AI models. And they won’t gain the productivity gains that AI can provide.

You’re also juggling how to incorporate AI into your existing workflows, onboard users, and communicate the value of AI so employees use it. 

Enter Zoom AI Companion, your smart AI assistant on the Zoom platform. It’s part of the platform you trust, and the collaboration experience your employees already know and love — a quick click away from upleveling your team’s productivity by summarizing meetings and chat threads, composing messages in Team Chat and email, and helping to brainstorm and organize ideas on a whiteboard. And because it’s included at no additional cost for paid users on eligible Zoom plans,* you don’t need to worry about fitting a new tool into your budget.

Whether you’re actively considering AI Companion or looking for guidance on implementing it effectively, find the information you need below. (Need a primer on what AI Companion can do for your team? Start here).

Rigorous evaluation of any application is essential to help keep company data secure and reduce potential risks. Our commitment to responsible AI is based on Zoom’s strong culture of care, which puts security and privacy at the center of our products. If your organization already uses Zoom, you’re likely familiar with how we prioritize security, privacy, and compliance across our platform.

Importantly, Zoom does not use any of our customers’ audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models.

If you’re not familiar with Zoom’s security and privacy practices, our AI Companion Security and Privacy White Paper provides a detailed look at our product features and approach to responsible AI, answering many questions you may have while evaluating our AI solutions. 

Download the white paper for information on:

• How we use and protect your data
• Data flow and transmission to third parties (where relevant)
• Specific data storage and retention details for each AI Companion feature
• Our process for developing generative AI features

Administrators may enable or disable features for their entire account within the account settings page in the Admin Portal. You can choose whether to provide individual or all employees or just certain groups, with access to any or all of these features. 

It’s not an all-or-nothing choice — for instance, you may want employees to be able to summarize meetings with AI Companion but choose to hold off on capabilities like email or Team Chat compose while you complete more testing. You can easily switch access on or off in your account settings.

Click on the AI Companion tab, and you’ll see the ability to toggle each available feature on or off at the account level

Controlling access to AI features

To get even more granular, AI Companion allows you and your employees to control access to most features at the account, group, and user levels. 

Here’s what that looks like, using meeting summary as an example (this would apply to other AI Companion features as well):

• Enabling meeting summary at the account level means meeting hosts on your account (specifically employees within your organization with an eligible Zoom license) have the ability to initiate an AI-generated summary of their meeting.
• Account owners can create groups and manage access to AI Companion capabilities at the group level, giving some users access to meeting summaries while restricting access for others. You might want to do this as part of a pilot (more on how to set that up below) or for other reasons like compliance. 
• Hosts can choose to enable or disable meeting summary at the user level. That means hosts can decide for themselves whether they want AI Companion to generate a meeting summary for meetings they host. And, they can decide on a meeting-by-meeting basis whether to turn AI Companion on or off.

At the account and group levels, you can restrict settings by clicking the lock icon to prevent users from changing these settings. For instance, you can require that all meeting summaries get sent to only the meeting host.

Customizable settings provide even more admin control

Once you toggle a feature on, you have even more options to control how AI Companion’s outputs are shared and accessed. For instance, when you turn on meeting summaries, you can decide whether to keep those summaries to only the host, the host and internal attendees, or share summaries with all meeting invitees, including those outside your company.

Employees can choose when to use AI Companion

At the user level, employees can choose how they want to use AI Companion in meetings they host. They can enable AI Companion to automatically start a meeting summary for every meeting they host, or choose to start the summary manually. Hosts can also decide whether to allow attendees to ask AI Companion questions about the meetings they host. Hosts have the ability to turn these features on and off during a meeting. 

During a meeting, all attendees will be notified with a message when AI Companion capabilities are turned on, and a glowing AI Companion icon will be visible in the top right corner of the meeting window if AI Companion is active during the entire meeting.

Before you roll out AI Companion across your entire organization, you might want to look into running a pilot with a select group of employees. This allows you to test the capabilities and gather feedback and learnings from a smaller user base first. And with our granular controls for AI Companion, it’s easy to do that. Here’s how:

1. Create a new group for your testers in the User Management section of your account.
2. Create a separate new group for non-testers.
3. In your account settings, click on the AI Companion tab. From here, you can choose which AI Companion capabilities you’d like to enable — this will be at the account level, meaning for all users on your account. In the next step, you’ll restrict access to the broader organization while allowing access to your test group.
4. Under User Management, select your test group, then navigate to the AI Companion tab and enable the features you’d like the test group to access. 
5. Select your non-tester group, the one that includes all other users in your organization. Click on the AI Companion tab, then disable all features for the non-tester group. Click the lock icon to prevent users in this group from changing it. 

If you like, you can assign separate admins to your test group — they won’t have full admin account access, but they will be able to add and manage members in your test group. This is perfect if you’d like to delegate someone to manage the pilot, even if they aren’t an account admin.

Employee communication is critical when rolling out any technology. After all, if employees aren’t informed about what’s available, bought in about how it can help them, and comfortable using it, they probably won’t adopt it. 

Here’s a template email for introducing AI Companion to your team:

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Dear [employees],

We’re excited to announce that AI Companion, Zoom’s generative AI assistant, is now available for you to use on Zoom

AI Companion has a number of capabilities designed to help you throughout your workday to help enhance productivity and collaboration. It can:

• Summarize Zoom meetings, giving you a recap of what happened and action items, even without recording the meeting. It can also summarize lengthy Team Chat threads, helping you save time with a synopsis of the conversation.

• Answer questions you have about a meeting in real time — like “Was my name mentioned?” or “What are next steps?”

• Compose Team Chat messages and emails in Zoom Mail emails with the appropriate tone and length. All you have to do is provide a prompt.

• Make recordings easier to review by dividing them into smart chapters by topic, highlighting important info, and identifying action items.
• Generate ideas on a Zoom Whiteboard based on your prompt, helping you kick-start brainstorming sessions.

[NOTE: EDIT THE ABOVE LIST BASED ON THE AI COMPANION FEATURES YOU CHOOSE TO ENABLE OR THE ZOOM PRODUCTS YOU ARE LICENSED FOR]

We know you may have some questions about using this new tool. Read on for more info:

Can I choose whether to use AI Companion?

You have control over which AI Companion capabilities you want to use in meetings you host. You can turn these capabilities on or off at any time, and you can choose whether or not to use them in your meetings on a case-by-case basis. You can also choose when to turn AI Companion on or off while your meeting is in progress. A glowing sparkle icon will be visible in the top-left corner of your window if AI Companion is active during a meeting. If you join a meeting where AI Companion capabilities are being used, you’ll be notified with a disclaimer. 

Will my meeting conversations be used to train AI models?

Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models.

How do I get started?

Just look for the AI Companion sparkle icon while you’re using Zoom — in your Meetings toolbar, Team Chat, Mail, or Zoom Whiteboard. 

• Refer to Zoom’s Getting Started Guide for more details, and to learn how you can make the most of AI Companion in your workday. 
• If you want to turn off certain AI Companion capabilities, go to your Zoom profile settings and look for the AI Companion tab. 
• For answers to the most common questions about getting started, visit Zoom’s support page: Using Zoom AI Companion.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns. 

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Tips for driving adoption

Once you’ve introduced AI Companion, follow these tips to drive adoption and help your employees learn how to use it effectively:

• Set up training sessions and virtual office hours via Zoom to help employees turn on AI Companion and answer questions they may have.
• Create a Zoom Team Chat channel dedicated to AI Companion so your employees can ask questions or share their own tips and best practices with each other.
• Create a committee of power users or AI enthusiasts to help employees, test new capabilities, or hold training sessions of their own, depending on their level of engagement.

Employee resources

Employees learn and engage in different ways, and we have a variety of AI Companion resources available that you can share with them.

• AI Companion support articles 
• Zoom Learning Center courses
• Blogs about AI Companion
• On-demand AI Companion webinar

Ready to get started with AI Companion? Here are a few important links:

• Check out the AI Companion page for the latest features and capabilities.
• Download our AI Companion Security and Privacy White Paper.
• Complete the Zoom AI Companion for Administrators course on the Zoom Learning Center.
• Visit your organization’s admin account portal to enable AI Companion.
• Read more about how other leaders and employees are thinking about AI in our AI in the Workplace report.

Editor’s note: This blog post was edited on July 22, 2024 to include the most up-to-date information on Zoom AI Companion.